Observations on language, literature, and other interesting phenomena

Menu

Mes chats me manquent.

It’s the last full day of my vacation. We’ll take it easy, do a little shopping, finish packing, and have a few last local beers. Tomorrow will consist of breakfast, a long drive to an airport, a long flight to another airport, and a long ride home. It will be a long day.

My internet access is still limited, but it’s better than it was last week when I would have had to sell a kidney just to check email. I look forward to having time and facilities to catch up on responding to your comments and reading everything I missed over the past two weeks. It’s been a wonderful vacation, but it will be nice to be home.

In the meantime, I offer a few language-related tidbits that have arisen in my travels:

My French has become very Zen. It’s focused on the present moment, and doesn’t worry about the past or future.

Is there really “no Montenegran language”?

If communication still occurs, does it matter if language is in ‘decline’? Is degradation in the eye of the beholder?

Many nautical terms have really interesting origins.

Sometimes your mind can tell you to speak in one language, but your mouth has a different idea.

War and Peace is really, really long.

There may be more, and it remains to be seen whether or not even the above-mentioned items result in interesting writing, but I’ve got plenty of starting points for a while!

France did treat us well, at least until the second to last day. On that day, my boyfriend tripped up some stairs and bruised a finger, then smacked his head getting into the car. Later, I slipped on a sidewalk curb and bruised my palm and knee, and had my foot stepped on, which bruised my toe (okay, granted – I do bruise quite easily). At that point, we figured France wanted us out ;)

And don’t worry – at this rate, I won’t be writing about War and Peace for several months. It is going better than I thought it would, and it was quite helpful because this translation kept all of Tolstoy’s French dialogue in French so it was good practice. But yeah…nautical terms it is!

It’s always kind of sad when a vacation ends, but you know that Zelda and Mrs. Parker will be overjoyed to see you. Of course, this will be after they ignore you for a few hours as punishment for abandoning them! :) Hope you had fun!

I was pleasantly surprised that my girls didn’t punish me when I got home! They came running over and spent a good deal of time rubbing their little wet noses against my face. I think they were too stunned to remember that they should be punishing me. Maybe after another vacation or two, they’ll understand that I will actually come back and that’s when they’ll get all stroppy about being left. I think this time they didn’t really know what was going on so they were just happy to see me :)

I hope that you had a great trip, but are also excited to come home. That’s usually how I feel anyway.

As you know, I’m trying to learn French this summer. So far I have steadfastly refused to learn any conjugations that aren’t present tense to avoid overwhelming myself. I’m pretty good at using a conjugation of “to go” and the infinitive to indicate future tense. Kind of feels like a cheat though. :-)

It was a fantastic trip but yes, it’s definitely nice to be home. I was getting tired of wearing the same clothes! And as tasty as those croissants were, it was nice to have my good ole Kashi Go Lean for breakfast ;)

The tenses definitely can overwhelm, especially with the two different auxiliaries in the passe compose, and of course the irregular verb participles. What I found interesting is that because my French has essentially been academic, I can read much more sophisticated constructions but didn’t have a lot of transactional, spoken language. A lot of those lessons came rushing back to me after a day or two, but I still had to check my dictionary for things like “Could you bring us a menu?” I could read the newspaper and understand most of it, but could barely muddle through the small chat with a salesgirl while buying a scarf.